


Jetpack Blues

by Kyogakura



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Character Death, Implied/Referenced Incest, M/M, Stancest - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-01
Updated: 2017-07-01
Packaged: 2018-11-21 22:38:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11367075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kyogakura/pseuds/Kyogakura
Summary: The song that could have been played from the time that Stan received the postcard from Oregon up to the time that Ford got sucked into the portal. My take on the Tale of Two Stans.





	Jetpack Blues

**Author's Note:**

> No fluff. Basically just pain on a cold rainy day while listening to Fall Out Boy.

Jet Pack Blues  


It was probably sunny outside the day he got the godawful postcard that lay inside his jacket. That day must have been full of promise but in retrospect, he wouldn’t have known nor would he have cared. On that specific day, a meteor could have gone hurtling to right on top of Stan Pines’ head and even that wouldn’t be enough to get him out of the psychological turmoil that came with the postcard he received.  


The Stanley Pines that woke up on that particular day to the banging on his motel room door had been so far removed from reality that he no longer knew the difference between day and night. He lived with the panic that came from being always too close to bodily harm or death, day in and day out. He had learned to live with the habit of always just resting in between sleeping and waking. His life now resembled a roadside tourist trap – falling apart at the seams but managing to stay afloat using all the lies that he keeps on milling out. To put it lightly, it was a habit-forming lifestyle. To make sense of it, it was the life of a has-been who had never been.  


Sometimes, it would be enough to while away the numbing pain of getting kicked out. Sometimes, it would be enough to forget the image of the closing curtains and the retreat of his twin brother’s back.  


However, he would always know the mocking scrawl that knocked him back to reality. As he turned the card over and read the short script that was practically screaming for him, he knew and he remembered. How many times had he copied from that handwriting ten years before?  


He remembered the way that six knuckles would dirty themselves with ink from the time they got home from school up to dawn. He remembered the hands that deftly cleaned his scrapes and bruises after every boxing match including those outside of the ring. If he allowed himself to remember enough shit without breaking down, he remembered those hands brushing against his cheeks just before feeling a pair of lips pressed against his own. These thoughts came crashing towards him in waves and it was all he could do to keep himself standing up.  


“Sixer,” he had muttered in a mix of relief, outrage, and self-loathing. The relief came from the thought that he’s going to go on living another miserable day and everything else came from the flimsy postcard from Gravity Falls, Oregon.  


He skipped town then and there – he wasn’t even sure where he’s coming from. What little he owned, he stuffed in his rucksack and threw in his mess of a car. He thought he had outgrown the automatic response of immediately coming to his brother’s side – like a slave in his beck and call. Apparently, he was just lying to himself as he turned to the highway heading down Oregon.  


_I got those jet pack blues_  
_Just like Judy_  
_The kind that, make June feel like September  
_ _I’m the last one that you’ll ever remember_

__

_And I’m trying to find my peace of mind_  
_Behind these two white highway lines_  
_When the city goes silent  
_ _The ringing in my ears gets violent_

He’s out front of the STNLYMBL, looking for a client in the night life of Nevada. He didn’t have enough money on him for gas and he’s thinking of just leaving his car and hightailing it cross-country. Yet here he finds himself peddling his wares because he doesn’t have enough sugar in his veins to continue his journey across the state. 

Man, he needed to eat.

So out he went, at first walking down the neon-drenched avenues and stuck around a corner. Eventually he got tired and just went back to his car. He wore his cleanest pair of jeans and white round neck shirt. He topped it with a worn letterman jacket and he hoped that he looked appealing enough without having to put in a bulge down front. Uncertainly, he ran a hand through his mullet (a mistake of nature but he didn’t have enough money on him to remedy it) and leaned on one side of his car in front of a conveniently-placed building just by his corner.

On nights like this, when he was practicing the oldest profession in the book, it always helped to look a little cleaner than your competitors. A little more innocent if it came to that. As if you’re just a little shy of socking them for touching you and just a little indulgent of their advances. Sometimes, he’d get lucky because the son of a bitch would be all vanilla. Sometimes, he’d get really luck and manage to catch old women or a group of women who were all just mildly interested in debauchery. More often than he cared to count, he’d get the jackass who was into some rope play and he prayed that it was only that. However, it rarely stopped at that. In those times, Stan would withdraw into himself. He would close his eyes and bite his cheeks and just get along to remembering toffee peanuts and acne. He remembered the six knuckles brushing his thighs and the other six that carded through his hair.

Eventually, Stan landed the catch of the night. The guy had brown hair, thick specs, and an unhealthy obsession with candles and rubber.

Inside the warmth of an unfamiliar room with unfamiliar fingers dancing through his body, Stan shut his eyes and remembered his happier days.

_He’s in a long black coat tonight_  
_Waiting for me in the downpour outside_  
_He’s singing “Baby come home” in a melody of tears  
_ _While the rhythm of the rain keeps time_

_Did you ever love him? Do you know?_  
_Or did you never want to be alone?_  
_And he was singing “Baby, come home”  
_ _I remember "Baby, come home"_

“You haven’t seen your brother in ten years…but it’s okay. He’s family. He won’t bite,” Stan muttered to himself as he desperately tried to calm his nerves in the cold Oregon winter. He brought a frost-bitten hand to knock on the door, allowing himself to hope for a warm welcome when the door opens. However, as he rapped on the wooden door he heard his inner Stan scream something awful. Now he knew that his instincts sometimes spoke some semblance of truth. The door creaked open to reveal a crouched feral figure. 

“Who is it?! Have you come to steal my eyes?!”

“Well, I can always count on you for a warm welcome,” he muttered, getting over the initial shock of having a crossbow aimed between his brows. 

“S-Stanley! Why are you here? Did anyone follow you here? Anyone at all?” Ford Pines asked looking like he had ten too many cups of coffee in the last hour. Dark patches of skin layered under his eyes and he stank of something more than the grease that Stan had always associated with his brother. Clearly, the successful Ford that Stan had been expecting to see is not doing as hot as he thought he would be.

“Eh…hello to you too, pal,” Stan managed to mask his disappointment behind a face of bored contempt. He stepped inside the shack and he expected the day to turn out weirder and weirder. However, the extent of weirdness had been lost to Stan. Apparently, his definition of weird would be stretch far to angles that he never really considered even with the life he led. His expectation of weird was overshot by ten spoons of Cuban coffee dissolved in ten bottles of that godawful energy drink.

In the stretch of time that lay between Stan getting inside the cabin and just before good old Poindexter smacked him with the science transdimensional metaportal thingamajig, Stan can only hear the hammering inside his chest and the dull pain of exhaustion behind his eyes. He didn’t really think about it that much. His senses were filled with the presence of Ford after more than ten years of being apart. It was all he could do to stop himself from pinning his brother against a wall and smacking him something good or to pin him against the wall for all the earthly reasons he can think of. He relented to punching and shoving back and in the end, ten years didn’t really seem like a long enough time to see if sleeping lions really lie.

With every punch exchanged, both knew that the heat didn’t only come from the broken science project. Between then and now, a multitude of reasons and failed convictions fell between each physical jab. To an onlooker, it would just be a fight for masculine frailty. For the two men hashing it out, it was about all the broken dreams, disappointment, and heartbreak. To Stan, it was seeing the swing set rattling empty against the wind and one set of footprints making its way home. For Ford, it would be being alone in the stan-o-war thinking about the familiar soft lips against his that promised both his destruction and reprieve.

For whatever it was worth, ten years could have just happened yesterday as the wounds remained fresh. Ten years would eventually seem like nothing as the final shove Stan gave Ford would seal a further thirty years for the both of them. It seemed like wounds would always remain fresh if cut it further in and nearer the bone.

_I’ve got those jet pack blues_  
_Fight off the light tonight and just stay with me  
_ _Honey, don’t you leave_

Stan sat unresponsive in the middle of a room filled with regrets clutching a pair of glasses to his chest along with a myriad of conflicting emotions. His brother, his once-upon-a-time lover, disappeared behind a flash of primordial light and he was lost forever and Stan doesn’t know what to do and why does he always have to be such a fucked up stupid little piece of shit – every bad decision and everything he thought he did right all came down to this one solid conclusion: Ford was never coming back.

Unless Stan can do anything about it.

_Don’t you remember how we used to split a drink?_  
_It never mattered what it was_  
_I think our heads were just that close  
_ _The sweetness never lasts, you know_

Across the portal, Stanford Pines stood up from the crumpled heap he had arrived in. His mind didn’t have the usual dull buzz that came with having Bill in there. These short nuances of peace are something that Ford had always cherished because it had felt like years since he had any of it. However, the relief he felt had been short-lived as he turned to survey what lay before him.

Everything was frighteningly familiar. 

In his initial shock, he didn’t notice the log cabin that was a close replica of what he had built in his own dimension’s Oregon. He didn’t realize the presence of a familiar mullet head walking up the front porch of the cabin or the sudden twang of a crossbow. In the instant that exists between then and now, a man resembling Stanley Pines fell dead on the snowy porch.

Ford heard himself scream in tandem with a voice much like his own. His brain was already short-circuiting when he realized who had killed Stan. He looked to a mirror reflection of his face whose pupils were just a little bit different, a little bit more yellow.

“Hiya IQ! I’m sorry you had to see that BUT WATCH OUT! I’m gonna DO me another TRICK and I betcha you’ll LOOOOOOVE this ONE! BETTER than the FORK bit I swear!” the cackle of Bill sounded before another arrow released into this dimension’s Stanford Pines’ skull.

Two men lay dead in the snow and another was clutching his chest gasping for breath – all three of them sharing the same face.

Quietly, Stanford Pines stood up. He had work to do.

_And I remember,” Baby, come home”_


End file.
